Neocolonialism (video game)

Development

Esther Alter conceived the idea in September 2011 while playing German-style board games with friends in Boston, after a friend joked about making a board game based on the Marxist theory of neocolonialism. Alter later blogged under the screenname "sampedestal", describing the game as a complex cocktail of financial and political decisions made by wealthy individuals. She noted that the game approximates a much more complicated real-world system, using only ten sovereign bonds per region as a simplified representation. During development, Alter showed versions to interested people and collected feedback. She requested donations to support herself while working on the game, stating in a video that donors would have a chance to take over the whole world. The version "Neocolonialism 1.0" was released in November 2013 and made available for purchase online.

Reception

Neocolonialism received mostly positive reception during development and after release. Alter noted that feedback was overly positive, and recalled a conversation with a woman about why she made a serious game that casts players as antagonists rather than heroes; Alter responded that the hero paradigm is problematic and that playing hero is mostly wishful thinking. Rock, Paper, Shotgun described the game as very smart and predicted it would involve secret deals and exploitation of cheap labor.

IndieGames.com called it a brilliantly nasty imperialism simulator. PC Gamer compared it to DEFCON with a bail-out instead of a bomb, stating that the player's job is to harm the world for a growing Swiss bank account. Hardcore Gamer observed that the game lets players manipulate global markets as a heartless hyper-capitalist monster. The Boston Globe wrote that it is one part Marxism and one part global economic collapse, offering the chance to be a powerful, amoral, behind-the-scenes conspirator.